RPGtonight Saturday Night Rumble starts Nov. 17th

[Naryt]

Hyptosis, I'm going on two years now for my weekly OpenRPG game, and I swear by it--but you are right that "flake out" is a common problem. It took us some time before we "settled" on a good group--and we've had to "encourage" some players to leave to get where we are now.

Hehe...encouraged...heehee. Well, I guess it's true, two just didn't match our playing style...Don handled those. The other was...interesting, please note that it's never a good idea to kill an established PC (yes, PC not NPC) your first night in game.

[Hyptosis]

haha, seriously, I'd say in the last 6 years, I've only played one full game online, it was on openrpg, and lasted a little over a year before it fell apart, saddly near the end of the story arch, but what can you do? =P

[RPMiller]

I play two games, one on the 1st and 3rd Tuesday and the other every Thursday. We play using MapTool for both and the Tuesday game uses Ventrilo for voice. Both games have been incredibly successful. So online gaming is definitely possible. It is just a matter of getting the right tools and players which it sounds like I've be unusually successful with.

[Hyptosis]

Wow, map tool looks pretty wicke,d is that anything like openrpg? It looks a ot like it, only maybe more advanced map... tools.. oddly enough. =P I've never played over a voice chat, I'd set up a voice chat with video support for me and my friends back in the day, but they still weren't reliable enough to show up half the time. =P Very frustrating after spending 20 plus hours building a campaign and making maps. =]

[RPMiller]

I'll put it this way, MapTool can pretty much do everything that OpenRPG can do, and is growing on a weekly basis with incredible support and user driven features.

The group I joined a while back was using ORPG, but finally switched to MapTool and we haven't looked back since.

For VoIP, I highly recommend Ventrilo, and highly discourage the use of Skype. I've posted elsewhere the reasons for not using Skype so I won't post them here. Whether using voice or chat the games seem to go just as fast and we get as much done in both - barring technical difficulties that might crop up.

[Naryt]

I'll put it this way, MapTool can pretty much do everything that OpenRPG can do, and is growing on a weekly basis with incredible support and user driven features.

The two things that prevent me from moving to MapTool:

Only 100 chat macros, just one of my character nodes has over 130 entries that would be considered chat macros by MapTool.

Aliases. OpenrRPG allows me to setup chat aliases (not command aliases which they both have) so I can quickly change between characters each with uniquely colored text (or not if I choose). I can change to any alias I've previously made with a single mouse click. The only way I've found to accomplish something like this in MapTool is to use the /im command and set the text color manually.

[RPMiller]

MapTool uses both Token and Button Macros now. Combined you'll easily have your 130.

MapTool has an Impersonate command that lets you impersonate any token you want. This changes the image in front of the text to that of the token.

Like I said, changes happen every week and there is a whole list of future changes up. Best of all we the users now have direct control of what changes happen next via the "wall of features".

So, now that those are out of the way, can we expect you to adopt MapTool soon.